Unless you live in Florida, in which case you've got your own problems. The map you see above is Saturday's wind chill forecasts for the entire country via AccuWeather. Much of the Northern and Midwestern parts of the country will be experiencing temperatures that feel like they are between -20 and -40 degrees. The National Weather Service is calling the temperatures "life-threatening."

It won't be much better on the East Coast, where New York, Boston, and Philadelphia will be hovering around the zero degree mark. Even Southern California — normally still a baked hellscape even in the winter — will see the wind chill dip towards freezing.

So you probably shouldn't go out tonight. The Proposal is on FX!

The Porsche Carrera GT driven by Roger Rodas and carrying Fast & Furious star Paul Walker was traveling more than 100 mph before it crashed in November, killing both men, according to the final autopsy report from the LA county coroner.

The new information refutes earlier claims that the car was only traveling 40 or 45 mph before it went out of control.

Stories quoting the report in the Los Angeles Times and other news outlets say that Walker's body was burned so badly following the crash that it was unrecognizable and that his organs could not be donated.

The report also says Rodas suffered severe and ultimately fatal head injuries when the Carrera GT crashed at a fundraiser for Walker's charity.

From their story:

The car crashed into a pole and several trees on Hercules Street in Santa Clarita. The force was so strong that after the driver's side of the vehicle hit a light pole and tree, the car continued spinning until Walker's passenger side slammed into another tree and burst into flames, according to the report.

"It appeared that the vehicle was almost split in half," according to the report.

The report also said neither man had any drugs or alcohol in their system when they died.

Photo credit AP

Republican congressman Aaron Schock — who represents Illinois' 18th congressional district — is known for one thing: being pretty and probably-almost-certainly gay. Schock is anti-gay on the record and he's frequently affirmed his straightness, but he may be feeling a gust of air this morning thanks to a sledgehammer wielded by journalist Itay Hod.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this post identified Itay Hod as a member of CBS News. A CBS News spokesperson says that Hod, who lists himself as a "reporter, writer and producer" at CBS on his Linkedin is "not a CBS News employee."

Early yesterday, Hod — who is also gay — posted a long note on Facebook wondering why no journalist has ever outed Schock, who he claims has been caught by a journalist in the shower with his male roommate as well as in gay bars by TMZ. "Doesn't the media have an OBLIGATION to expose hypocrisy?" he asks:

here's a hypothetical: what if you know a certain GOP congressman, let's just say from Illinois, is gay... and you know this because one of your friends, a journalist for a reputable network, told you in no uncertain terms that he caught that GOP congressman and his male roommate in the shower... together. now they could have been good friends just trying to conserve water. but there's more. what if this congressman has also been caught by tmz cameras trolling gay bars. now what if you know that this very same guy, the darling of the gop, has also voted against repeal of don't ask don't tell, opposed the repeal of doma, is against gay marriage; and for the federal marriage amendment, which would add language to the us constitution banning gay marriage and would likely strike down every gay rights law and ordinance in the country?

Are we still not allowed to out him?

Hod goes on to defend outing the "certain GOP congressman" before posting a link to "The 7 gayest Aaron Schock Instagram posts of 2013" juuuuust to make sure we're all on the same page.

This might end up being a shitty weekend for Schock, or maybe it will be a freeing one. Maybe he'll even finally cop to being queer — as long as he's getting a 0% score from the Human Rights Campaign it's not like any of his fellow bigots in the GOP will care anyway.

And, hey, there is light at the end of the tunnel for the Illinois congressman who represents the city's capital of Springfield: in June he can get married.

UPDATE: It appears that after this story broke Schock moved his Instagram account to private. As (fellow) gay conservative Josh Barro pointed out yesterday, of the 71 people Schock follows on Instagram, one is queer swimmer/twink Tom Daley.

Below is Hod's full note, in the event that one of his bosses urges him to delete it:

people always say, no one has the right to out anyone. that coming out is a private matter. i disagree. as you can imagine, not a very popular opinion. but bear with me.

here's a hypothetical: what if you know a certain GOP congressman, let's just say from Illinois, is gay... and you know this because one of your friends, a journalist for a reputable network, told you in no uncertain terms that he caught that GOP congressman and his male roommate in the shower... together. now they could have been good friends just trying to conserve water. but there's more. what if this congressman has also been caught by tmz cameras trolling gay bars. now what if you know that this very same guy, the darling of the gop, has also voted against repeal of don't ask don't tell, opposed the repeal of doma, is against gay marriage; and for the federal marriage amendment, which would add language to the us constitution banning gay marriage and would likely strike down every gay rights law and ordinance in the country?

Are we still not allowed to out him?

let me ask another question... doesn't the media have an OBLIGATION to expose his hypocrisy? if he had done something so hypocritical and he wasn't gay, wouldn't we demand journalists do their job? but they can't... because we won't let them. you're not allowed to out ANYONE, we tell them.

we've created a situation where even though news organizations know this guy is gay, they can't report it because he hasn't said so on twitter.

if we keep saying that being gay is genetic; ergo, it's no different than having blue eyes or blonde hair... than why are not allowed to mention it? why do we need anyone's consent to talk about their sexuality? are we not allowed to say someone has blue eyes until they post a fb message telling us they are in fact blue?

we've been so effective at convincing everyone that outing people is a crime against humanity, that we've made it impossible for any network or news organization to talk about this "hypothetical" gay republican congressman and his hypocritical vote against gay rights. they won't touch it for fear of retribution from GLAAD or HRC. (in fact when my friend's network interviewed said hypothetical republican, he talked about wanting to find a nice woman to marry... and the network aired it... knowing it was a lie...

so, forgive me if I don't subscribe to the notion that you're not allowed to out anyone... in fact in some cases, i'd celebrate it. but I'm crazy that way.

[via Queerty, image via Getty]

It started before a friend told me that he wanted to date white women and before another friend told me “fuck white people.” It started before two 14-year-old girls on their way to a birthday party were crushed to death on the Yangju Highway, before George Bush put North Korea on the Axis of Evil, and even before either of my parents was born.

The Korean government turned a blind eye to prostitution at American military bases so the soldiers would stop raping civilians and the Korean people boiled leftover hotdogs, spams, and beans from American military bases to create “military soups,” once known as the “Lyndon B. Johnson soup.” MacArthur was hailed as a national hero and phrases like “even shit tastes better American” were thrown around while, halfway around the world, America did its best to continue its worst by beating and killing its own people.

A decade later, people in both countries held hands and sang “All You Need Is Love” with four British boys from Liverpool, but neither really started confronting the growing hatred towards each other or their own people. And I am their child. I am the child of these two nations with unresolved past, with public love and private hate, with open disdain and secret fetish, and with sons and daughters who grow up to lose their parents.

Before I knew any of this, I knew I had two passports while my parents only had one. I had the blue passport that they didn’t have and was told that being born in Queens was a good enough reason for me to have it. I had no memory of the place because our family moved to Korea when I was three. But whenever New York City came on the news, my parents would call out and say “Look, there’s your city!”

They told me and my brother that Abe Lincoln and Neil Armstrong were part of our history. They told us that we belonged to the strongest nation in the world. History books said the same thing. Hollywood movies said the same thing. Olympic Games said the same thing. And when another Korean found out that I had this blue passport, I saw in their faces that they were thinking the same thing.

In 1998, I liked being Korean. I loved being American.

Sometime that year, Aunt June came from California with a giant bag of assorted candies. I had been saving up lollipops in my candy box for months and had only collected five or six. So when Aunt June came with enough candies to fill the box ten times over, the message I received was clear: Fuck saving, here’s three thousand candies – there’s more of these where I’m from.

Although I could never get myself to like the Laffy Taffys or the Lemonheads and ended up throwing most of the candies away, I wanted to go where Aunt June was from. And while I sat on the sofa opening a bag after another, tasting candies, and spitting them out, mom sat across from Aunt June and listened to her stories. She heard about Aunt June’s white engineer husband, her two story house with a peach tree in the back, and her son who had just skipped second grade. Three years later, Aunt June called my mom and asked if she wanted to send me to America. My mom and I were so enchanted by the illusion of America that we agreed in a heartbeat.

In 2001, I moved alone to Aunt June’s house in California and my dad told me over the phone that my new name would be David. And at this time, I was more ready to be David than any other. Aunt June bought me a pair of Jordans that she called “Nike IIs,” jean shorts with side pockets, and a bunch of polo shirts in different colors. She suggested that I slip a book in my side pocket to accentuate the cool, so I grabbed a yellow Nancy Drew book and slid it in my right pocket. And in the morning of my first class in America, I spiked my new “four on the top, two on the sides” hair with lavish amount of L. A. Looks Mega Hold.

Over the weekend, I watched cartoon episodes on Disney so I’d have something to talk about with the kids. But when I met the kids in Mrs. Drippes’s third grade class at Desert Christian, they carried Pokémon lunch boxes and backpacks. They watched Dragon Ball Z. Jackie Chan was still cool enough to have his own cartoon show and his Rush Hour 2 was one of the highest grossing films of that year. Even Jet Li had a number one movie alongside DMX around this time. When I arrived in America, kids and adults were already consuming Asian culture and other twisted, distorted, and untrue forms of Asianness.

So in 2001, I let others fetishize my Asianness, because I was desperate to become American.

Along with the rest of the boys, I just watched Dragon Ball Z in which the Asian martial arts gods fought aliens by turning supersaiyen. When a character goes supersaiyen, his skin become pale, brown eyes become blue, black hair turns blond, and the strength increases fiftyfold. I watched and enjoyed Asian characters transforming into white gods without being hurt, because that hierarchy made sense. And it made sense to Asian American kids across America, to the Asian kids in Asia, and to the Asian animators who created this visual endorsement of white supremacy. And after all, that’s what many of our parents wanted for us—to become white, become powerful, and become what they couldn’t be.

These were brave parents who packed their bags and moved their families to America or sent their children to live with friends, relatives, and strangers. But these were also scared parents who renamed their kids as Davids, Daniels, Jessicas, and Amys. They gave up on keeping their family together by sending their children to host families, or they left their careers to become storekeepers; dry cleaners; nail salon, massage parlor, and donut shop owners; cooks;, and domestic workers so that their children would have the choices and paychecks that they could never have. They wanted their kids to be able to permeate the white spaces and escape their horizon of Koreatowns, Chinatowns, and ethnic churches.

“If you're not white, you're missing out because this shit is thoroughly good. I'm not saying white people are better, but I'm saying that being white is clearly better. Who could even argue?” Louis C. K. says in “Chewed Up.”

And this is exactly what our parents thought. So when they saw that their children could perform as white, they encouraged it without teaching us or telling us to love our Asian side. And as the line between performing as white and being white blurred, so did the line between thinking white people are better and thinking that being white is better. In hindsight, our biggest mistake was having believed in the line at all.

***

In middle school, we grew out of the Dragon Ball Z phase and entered the Jackass phase. To us puberty-stricken Christian school kids, Jackass and its spinoff shows like Viva la Bam and Wildboyz—in which white dudes ran around not giving a fuck about others, themselves, and the consequences—were not only funny, but even somewhat admirable. Aunt June had a son named Billy who I looked up to like my older brother, and he incorporated this not-giving-a-fuck mentality into himself in the form of Asian jokes. He was the funny Asian kid in his grade who didn’t care about saying racist jokes about himself and the other Asians. That gave him a pass on saying other racist jokes toward other groups of people as well.

As little brothers do, I learned from Billy and performed this character to my friends. On a daily basis, I told jokes involving Asian parents, bad driving skills, nerds, rice and eggrolls, small dicks, dog eaters, squinty eyes, accents, kung fu, and William Hung. And as long as my friends laughed, it felt great. I invited other kids to do the same with their race or ethnicity. There were only about 60 kids in my grade and soon, these racist jokes became a part of our language. Saying one more of these jokes became easier and easier. With no other Asian, black or Hispanic students to tell us that the jokes were hurtful, we just continued with white students laughing at our jokes and encouraging us on. The worst and most hurtful jokes, we often told ourselves. And we thought not giving a fuck, not being so sensitive, but, instead, being “cool with it” was our way of saying that we were not what we made fun of.

But every once in a while, I secretly feared that I wasn’t so different from what I made fun of. I was scared, despite all my Asian disses, that I was still an Asian boy who joked his ass off to become American and failed. So I overcompensated by over-consuming culture. I read books, listened to music, watched movies, and watched television more than any of my friends. I broke every Accelerated Reader record at my school, watched every movie in the IMDB Top 250 that I could find, listened to whatever album got over 8.0 on Pitchfork, and watched whatever television show that kids talked about in school. I figured that if I knew more, read more, watched more, and listened to more of American culture than any of my friends, no one could tell me that I wasn’t American.

In 2004, I hated being Korean, but I was obsessed with being American.

Around this time, however, my parents sensed that I was slipping away. They saw that I spoke English well, that I had white friends and girlfriends, and that I could become—as they wished—a part of “them.” But they missed being a part of my life. And they feared that they would lose a son and never get him back. They feared that I would lose a family and become lost.

So my parents found an international school in Korea where I could continue studying in English. They called me back to Korea in 2005 and I agreed, somewhat reluctantly, and returned to Korea.

The international school was filled with other Korean kids who had American citizenships. They were also sons and daughters of scared Korean parents who'd given them the most boring and safe American names. And even here, the kids didn’t blend in with other Korean kids, but formed their own community of Asian Americans. We were all fixated on consuming and learning American culture, and didn’t even try to learn or love the people and the culture we lived among.

These confused kids watched the Super Bowl without knowing the rules, called each other “niggas” and “G’s” and said shit like, “You’re from California? I’m so jealous!” Kids made fun of Korean accents, and the teachers sent students to the principal’s office for speaking Korean. The school sponsored programs like Habitat for Humanity and volunteer trips to South Asian countries, when, five minutes from the school, people lived in unauthorized housing, not knowing when the government or the landowners might force them to move out.

In 2005, these Asian-American kids and I were bad at loving our Korean side. And like many of our parents before us, we continued to uncritically accept all things American.

After two years there, I moved to Texas with my brother, to the house of a friend of my mom's. My brother had stayed in Korea after our family left New York, so he spoke little English and had no idea what America would be like. But he had all the same illusions that I had. He willingly consumed American culture like me and dreamed about going to an American college and living up to his blue passport.

But at Paschal High School, teachers proudly talked about the existence of two different schools within one—one school with kids taking honor and AP classes and another with kids taking regular classes—and they didn’t care that the system separated most black and brown students from white students. They used phrases like “better opportunity” and “academic excellence,” but they didn’t love their students enough to teach or motivate all of them equally. The socioeconomic and racial divide was evident even during lunch times, when one group of students ate 40-cent government lunch while the other group ate homemade lunches or bought lunch from the in-school Pizza Hut vendor.

On my first day of school, my English teacher told me that I looked like “the Chinese kid in Disturbia.” I had no idea what that meant. Then a white student said to me during class: “Your eyes are so black, it’s almost like you don’t have an iris.” A couple days later, the school asked me to take an English proficiency test in which a lady asked “Man is big, bears are bigger, and dinosaurs are?” and “Grass is green and sky is?” My soccer coach, when I told him not to call me Bruce Lee, said “Other Asian kids liked it when I called them Bruce Lees.” Then a kid in my soccer team told me to show him my dick, because he'd heard Asian dicks were small.

When I asked for my college counselor’s help because I didn’t even know what SATs were, she laughed and said “That’s such an Asian thing to ask.” Then, the week before my college applications were due, she went on a vacation without writing my recommendation letter. The office ladies refused to call her cell phone, because we needed to “respect her privacy.” After the due date, she returned and said “Oops, sorry.” When I asked my English teacher if she could check my essay, she returned it the next day, unmarked, except for the comment “interesting.” A couple weeks before graduation, some students asked me to be in a photo and represent diversity so they could get Obama to come and speak.

For the first time, I started to feel something that I hadn’t felt when I was with other nine-year-olds in California or the confused Korean kids in Seoul. I knew that I wasn’t seen as an American by these people. And I thought, maybe, I had been deceiving myself into thinking that I was something that I couldn’t ever be. The term Asian American didn’t make sense to me. The people who we described as successful Asian Americans seemed to be the ones who successfully grew out of their Asianness and become Americans.

Nobody I knew had ever articulated what being an Asian American really was. Having an accent was a failure. Not speaking their parents’ language was not. Having no white friends was a failure. Having no Asian friends was not. Having a white partner was a success. Having black and brown partners was not. Many Asian American kids ate kimchi at home, loved ramen noodles, had Asian parents, and had exposure to Asian culture and language. Yet, they hid and distanced themselves from Asianness. They tweaked their last names on Facebook to sound white and separated themselves from Asian kids from Asia saying “I’m from New Jersey,” “I’m from North Carolina,” and “I’m just American.”

In 2010, I didn’t feel Korean. And I felt unwanted as an American.

I have taken language classes, econ classes, art classes, sociology classes, film classes, and English classes in college. I have learned to start sentences with “I feel like. . .” or “I think it’s interesting that. . .” I've learned to define people and their experiences. I've learned to use and misuse detached academic words like “diversity,” “privilege,” and “safe space” in my arguments and conversations. But I've never been asked to see my relationship to the people we defined. I was never asked to use “love” in the place of these impersonal words we leaned on.

I have written about gay marriages, black cinema, Asian images, woman’s rights, but never about love. And never with love. I have forgotten about that word for so long that I couldn’t remember how I wanted to be loved, how I loved, and how I failed to love. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I haven’t ever loved myself.

When I watched Bobby Lee, Ken Jeong, and Psy, I hated myself as a Korean. When I watched a YouTube video of white guys harassing a Korean girl saying “Why can’t you get plastic surgery like every other Korean bitches” and yelling “We gotta get the boobs in there,” I hated myself as an American. But even before these incidents, I have seen Korea failing to love its own people, America failing to love its own people, and both countries failing to love each other.

***

About four years ago, my brother went back to Korea, after three years in America. He started having nightmares, so he would stay up as long as he could until his body gave up to sleep. And when he sleeps, he shrieks. He wakes up crying. My mom called me one day to tell me that he drank alone at a bar and punched through five windows. “What happened in America?” she asked.

And a couple months ago, my friend Daniel said to me after watching Louis C. K. perform: “I think white people are just better.” A couple weeks later, I got a call from another friend saying that Daniel went crazy, ran around Third Avenue barefooted, and the police took him to a hospital. I went through two password-protected doors at Beth Israel to see him, and he told me that he ran for his life because he saw “I’m in your area” pop up on his computer screen. He said that when he tried to run away, a man in a red hoodie carrying a knife came to kill him. He said things that I couldn’t even understand, and then started writing down names of white artists that we idolized for years.

“They always knew,” he said.

What?

What the fuck happens in America? What happens in America that my brother spends three years here and starts having nightmares too freighted to forget? What happens in America that my best friend who loved and consumed American culture all his life says, after spending two years in NYU, that white people are just better? What happens in America that makes him run for his life because he thinks someone is coming to kill him?

I couldn’t tell you what. But I can tell you how America failed to love. I can tell you that America doesn’t love its inarticulate. Instead of asking my brother “How can I help?” or “What can I do?” teachers suggested lower level classes and punished with words and grades. College professors did the same. When he turned in essays much more articulate than his speech, they asked “Who helped you?” and “What did you plagiarize?”

Instead of thinking about why all their friends and girlfriends are white, white students ask “Why do they only hang out with other black kids?” or “Why do they only date other Asians?” They say minorities are being exclusive. And in the classrooms, rather than trying to understand and love, we learn to define and patronize other people and their experiences.

America tries constantly to ignore the weak and break the strong. Korea has no love for itself or for the others. We worship, consume, and imitate forms of whiteness, forms of blackness, and forms of Asianness, but we still label them Yankees, niggers, chinks, and Japs. And America and Korea both don’t love their beautiful or the ugly. We define and limit beauty. Korea decided that double eyelids are beautiful, so we put them artificially on those who don’t have them. America can’t love a crooked smile, so our kids live with metal in their mouth for three years.

We’re bad lovers, so we continue the cycle of hate and self-hate. We let the producers of 21 whitewash Asian characters. We let Spike Lee remake Oldboy and cast Josh Brolin as its lead. We let shows like Friends and Girls show only white relationships and use Asian and black actors and actresses to play interim lovers. We let SNL go thirty-nine years without casting a single Asian comedian. We make talented Asian actors come to America and play ninjas and yakuzas. We cast Asian actors and models with stereotypical Asian faces and un-stereotypical Asian bodies. We fetishize them by giving “sexiest man of the year” or “sexiest woman of the year.” And we ignore Baldwin’s warning that we could “lose our faith—and become possessed.”

We lose our faith in ourselves and lose our faith in our ability to love.

And instead, we partake in phony performances and dialogues of love. Drake singing “Shout out to Asian girls, let their lights dim-sum” is not love. A commercial saying “White, black, brown, yellow, purple, green, we’re all the same” is not love. I want to hear our pop culture honestly try to articulate love. I want to stop reading buzzwords like “safe space” that generate the false illusion of safety and the false sense of invasion. I want to see us love and fight for each other when no one is watching.

I have learned to perform love without loving, I hurt the people that I love. I wrote about them in stories and essays and talked about them in classes and meetings, but I failed to love them when I was alone. I didn’t return my mom’s calls and responded to her five paragraph texts with two sentences. “Sorry, I’ll call when I’m not busy” or “I’m working on an essay” were my responses to her love letters. I didn’t tell my friend to stop taking drugs until he was in the hospital. I didn’t listen to my dad’s stories when he was drunk. I didn’t tell my brother that I loved him. I never even asked how he was holding up. Yet I asked them to love me in all those ways. And, in all those ways, they unreasonably do.

This is a crazy-making environment, but some of us never go crazy—even if we want to. And it’s because we have people who love us too much to let it happen to us. We have people who give us calls, who miss meetings to talk to us, who fight for us, and who try to interpret our jumbled utterances and understand our quietest groans. We have people trying to love us in ways that won’t be on posters and t-shirts and in ways that won’t be written in emails or spoken about in meetings.

In 2013, I thought about love and talked about love. I tried to love, failed to love, tried again, and failed again. But the people who loved me unreasonably kept me sane and kept me trying.

In 2013, I could have been an orphan. But I remained a child of Korea. I remained a child of America.

Now it’s my turn to love.

David Byunghyun Lee is a junior at Vassar College

[Image by Jim Cooke]

"It takes a few days for things to return to normal, but we're officially back!," says the recently exiled lyrics crew. Sure enough, RG links are popping back up on Google, and the foot-in-mouth Yalie founders say they're "sorry for being such morons."

The news comes as part of a long, detailed post about the company's SEO practices (and abuses), chronicling how the group basically tried more and more daring ways to manipulate search results to their advantage. It worked, until it went too far:

We regret our foray into irrelevant unnatural linking. We're focused on building the best site in the world for understanding lyrics, poetry, and prose and watching it naturally rise to the top of the search results.

It also looks like the startup learned a lesson about being entirely dependent on Google:

Though Google is an extremely important part of helping people discover and navigate Rap Genius, we hope that this ordeal will make fans see that Rap Genius is more than a Google-access-only website. The only way to fully appreciate and benefit from Rap Genius is to sign up for an accountand use Rap Genius – not as a substitute for Wikipedia or lyrics sites, but as a social network where curious and intelligent people gather to socialize and engage in close reading of text.

Perhaps most interestingly, the mea culpa is particularly hard on Mahbod Moghadam, who you might remember as the Rap Genius co-founder who told Mark Zuckerberg to suck his dick and then blamed it on a brain tumor. The group explanation on the site serves as a public chiding for Maghadam, too. Referring to the "blog affiliate" program that finally got Rap Genius busted, the group says the following:

It started when John Marbach wrote to Mahbod to ask him about the details of the "Rap Genius blog affiliate program" (a recent Mahbod coinage)

[...]

Mahbod wrote back, and without asking what kind of blog John had or anything about the content of the post he intended to write, gave him the HTML of the tracklist of Bieber's new album and asked him to link it. In return, he offered to tweet exactly what John wanted and promised "MASSIVE traffic" to his site.

The dubious-sounding "Rap Genius blog affiliate program", the self-parodic used car salesman tone of the email to John, the lack of any discretion in the targeting of a partner – this all looked really bad. And it was really bad: a lazy and likely ineffective "strategy", so over-the-top in its obviousness that it was practically begging for a response from Google.

The whole thing is basically pinned on Mahbod. We imagine Google will be keeping its all-seeing eye on the site in the meantime, and Mahbod will have some uncomfortable words with his colleagues and investors.

We can finally declare the first meme of the year: Selfie Olympics aka extreme selfies aka #And1SelfieLeague, in which kids take increasingly absurd bathroom selfies. If you're anti-selfie culture, avert your eyes.

The "rules" of Selfie Olympics — as documented by @SelfieOlympics — are simple: you must be inside a bathroom (well, sort of) and you must use some sort of prop. Above you see a safari selfie, and other recent entrants include a replica of Foot Locker, a funeral, a dude with his head in a fish tank, a dude with his head in the toilet (who knows), and Big Sean playing Pacman in his bathroom. Maybe if someone locks the door he'll never rap again.

But easily the best part of Selfie Olympics is that it's not built on white people bastardizing black culture for giggles. I now leave you with Selfieception.

[Today a plane crash-landed on the Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx. Three people suffered injuries, but none are believed to be life-threatning. Every year gets the Sully Sullenberger it deserves. Photo via Twitter user Daniel Miller.]

Being insanely rich: it really must be nice. Today, various reports stated that Amazon founder and Washington Post purchaser Jeff Bezos was shepherded between islands in the Galapagos by the Ecuardorian navy so he could receive treatment for a kidney stone on New Year's Day.

Bezos was on a cruise ship off Santa Cruz Island in the Galapagos when he was retrieved by a helicopter and taken to his private jet on Baltra Island, which is also in the Galapagos. From there he flew to the U.S. to receive "emergency treatment." There's been no word if Charlie Rose was waiting holding a bedpan.

If you can't immediately get a country's navy on the phone, it's not recommended that you contract a kidney stone on a remote island.

[image via Getty]

[A dog in booties braves Central Park, which saw seven inches of snow on this week. Image via Getty]

You're not going to win the lottery — especially not the Mega Millions — but if you do you probably shouldn't leave the winning ticket lying around for two weeks as you obliviously continue on with your life. Steve Tran of Northern California did just that for 13 days.

According to California lottery officials, Tran — who was one of two people to claim last month's $648 Mega Millions jackpot — did not come forward until nearly two weeks after the winning numbers were announced. Tran is said to have left the winning ticket in a pile of other lotto stubs in his house before going on vacation with his family.

It was only when he returned that he heard an unclaimed winning ticket had been purchased in San Jose. Tran reportedly realized he won only after he woke up at 3 a.m. to check his tickets.

His share of the jackpot is $324 million before taxes, though Tran has not yet decided how he will take the money. The other winner — a Georgia woman named Ira Curry — took a lump sum of $173.8 million, which came out to a total of $120 million after state taxes.

Lotto officials in California have also announced that two winning tickets from the Dec. 17 Mega Millions drawing worth $2.6 million each were purchased in San Diego County but have yet to be brought forward. So, uh, get off your ass, Mitt Romney.

A Delta flight from Toronto skidded off the runway at JFK this morning. No one was injured, and traffic has resumed. Flying: it's the worst.

If you can think all the way back to 2011 you may remember Amy Chua, the Yale professor and "Tiger Mom" who set your Facebook feed on fire with a book excerpt that argued for maniacally strict parenting lest your kid become a massive failure. Well, she's back and she's coming for us all.

The New York Post has a review of her new book The Triple Package —co-authored by her husband, Jed Rubenfeld — which says that there are eight groups of people superior to all others: Chinese, Cuban exiles, Indians, Iranians, Jews, Lebanese-Americans, Mormons, and Nigerians. Remember, her daughter got into Yale and Harvard so it has to be true.

According to Chua and Rubenfeld, there are three reasons — the so-called "triple package," please bear with me — why those eight groups reign over everyone else in the world: a superiority complex, insecurity, and impulse control. They believe ("believe") that true success is reached because you believe you're better than everyone else, but also not really, and that you can resist temptation as you strive for a larger goal. Oh, and also that you haven't "yet bought into mainstream, post-1960s, liberal American principles."

If all of this sounds like complete nonsense it's because it probably is — reviewer Maureen Callahan is fiercely critical of the book's conclusions and its methods. But, obviously, none of that is really the point: Chua stumbled into a reputation as an agitator and here she has widened her scope as much as possible. Now, not only are parents supposed to get mad at the insinuation that they aren't ruthless enough assholes — and buy a book teaching them how to be — but everybody is.

Still, pop psych trolling this flagrant can only work for so long: it's actually hard to tell if Chua and her husband are trying too hard with this theory, or not even trying at all. That said, it is still just a wisp away from the best-sellers that influence all types of intellectuals: if Malcolm Gladwell repackaged this premise we would all be expected to bow down to his genius.

A 36-story building at 500 West 43 St. in Manhattan caught fire this morning, as seen in the video above, which was taken around noon ET. Flames were seen shooting out of a 20th floor apartment. Twitter user @MickeyAtwal said that he and his family were stuck on the 26th floor because the elevators were not working and the hallways were too smoky, but it seems as if residents above the fire is safe.

According to an FDNY spokesperson, two people were critically injured in the fire and taken to the hospital. The fire is now said to be under control.

This morning's Sunday NFL Countdown on ESPN found itself traversing very odd ground as panelist Trent Dilfer presented a package on what a great job Trent Dilfer did at making new ESPN hire Tim Tebow awesome at playing quarterback. How awesome? "Tom Brady" awesome, if you believe ESPN.

It's an odd turn from the network, which had previously finally acknowledged that yeah, maybe they went a bit overboard with the Tebow stuff. Of course, now that Tebow is pulling checks from the Mouse, everybody's back onboard to throat the NFL flameout. Even ESPN personalities who have nothing to do with Sunday NFL Countdown chimed in to praise all things Tebow:

Hey @TDESPN. Nice report on @TimTebow on Sunday NFL Countdown. Hope you're right and message to GM's gets thru. #ListenClosely

— Linda Cohn (@lindacohn) January 5, 2014

That's helpful, Linda. The whole segment is a disaster, what from Trent Dilfer pimping his own quarterback development side-job while trying to get his colleague Tebow hired by an NFL team—and then you have random dudes who show up and say Tebow's as good as anybody in the league. Here's the full transcript as recorded by closed captioning:

A month ago i got a call from Tim Tebow asked me to come down to USC where he's been training and give him a brutally honest evaluation where he's at. As we know, this past week, ESPN and Tim worked upon a deal to work with the SEC Network however he last not given up on his dream to play as quarterback in the national football league. My job is to see if he can pass well enough for that dream to become a reality.

Actually, Trent, your job is on a news program, serving as an NFL analyst.

Tebow: Every day i push myself to the limit. Every day i'm going to find the most out of every day. I'm going to work, i'm going to strive.

>>You have to throw it earlier and stay compact. Perfect.

Tebow: I've been able to understand over the course of the last four, five months, what it means to have mechanics. What it means to have foot work. What it means to be able to control your body.

>>All right. Three step slant off coverage. I want it out. Right now. That's all i'll show you. Okay? That's why your ball on this side has a tendency to do that. Finish with some energy. There you go. Good, good. Nice, Tim.

Boy, that came off good, though.

The process of rebuilding Tim Tebow's throwing mechanics, started on the usc campus with performance analyst Tom Haas.

>>I've never had somebody this strong. Timing, see consequencing, mechanics.

Haas knows mechanics. Joe Flacco, Tom Brady have passed through his facility.

Who the hell is this Tom Haas guy? The closed captioning clearly identifies him as "Tom Haas," but here's how he's identified onscreen:

We Googled for both "Tom House" and "Tom Haas" with "3DQB" and nothing came up. ESPN is making an argument that Tim Tebow's skills are equivalent to some of the NFL's most elite quarterbacks based on the words of a guy we can't even find on the Internet. (Update: we found him.)

>>I considerably was looking at 20%, to 25% better with tim.

>>I remember looking at tom and saying, we got some work to do. If. I'm seeing a lot of mechanical issue, timing issues.

>>There had to be really hard days where 99.9% of people would have tapped out and you just must love football more than you love what football brings you to keep doing that. Is that fair?

Tebow: There's some question about that. There are a lot of time when you're just being honest about it that it can get tiring. It can get a little frustrating. And you have to find that place inside of you that wants it.

>>To watch day in and day out, the motivation involved, not just for this day or next week, but for every stinking moment of every day that you're here, it's a pretty strong motivation. That's what i saw with Tim.

>>Would you put at the top as much as you've ever seen?

>>Yeah. He's up there for me with a guy named Nolan Ryan. That's in the same sentence two different sports, but same motivational muscle.

There goes Tom Haas (House?) again! Now he's ranking Tebow right there with The Ryan Express! What other bullshit could ESPN wring out of this dude-who-might-not-even-exist?

>>For somebody tightening everything up, this flick to the wrist. This check down, run-aways, options. Those are the ones, quick, quick, throwing darts. You can beat them with the ball. Now, good. Good. Same speed now locate it right here. Zone! Good. Nice location, too. Right there. Everything was perfect. Everything was perfect. Start throwing it as you're going there. Don't get there and then throw it. One movement. There we go. Perfect. Boom.

>> Why keep this NFL dream alive when so many people out there say you shouldn't?

Tebow: Because i love it. And when you love something and you're passionate about something, you want to go after it. No matter what my outcome is, it's okay, because i'm not going to have to turn around and live with regrets and say, man, i wish i would have trained hard. I wish i would have pushed myself. I wish i would have done more. Because every day, i've pushed myself to the limit.

>>I spent 365 days of the year looking at quarterbacks. High school, college pros. I don't have all of the answers. I do know this. If you put Tim Tebow on a football field with four other NFL quarterbacks, you didn't know who they were, and just watched the ball. Don't watch the player, just watch the ball. You wouldn't know which one is Tim Tebow and you wouldn't know which one is the NFL quarterback. I want you to watch this in context. This is one of the greatest players to play college football and he didn't know how to pass. I believe now he knows how to pass. Every GM, every scout, every person out there should go at least watch Tim Tebow now, because it's a different guy.

[This has been a paid advertisement for Tim Tebow, professional American football quarterback.]

For kicks, here is a short gallery of "Previously in Tim Tebow on ESPN":

To contact the author of this post, write to tim@deadspin.com or find him on Twitter @bubbaprog.

TLC has a new show called Sex Sent Me to the ER, which airs on Saturdays at 10 p.m. for maximum viewer shame. Last night's episode featured a Seattle woman named Liz who once had to go to the hospital in the midst of a three-hour orgasm. For the show, she and her boyfriend Eric reenacted the night for TLC's cameras, a reenactment that included Liz moaning in agony and/or ecstasy.

I stopped watching at the point where she gets wheeled into a Very Realistic hospital, but if you make it past that point please (don't) tell me how it ends.

A bunch of celebrities just saw a plane crash at an airport in Aspen. What a weekend for planes, which are terrifying.

A new survey finds that male economics Ph.D.'s who get married early in their careers see their salaries grow 25%, while females who do the same thing see their salaries shrink by 23%. You can't argue with the free market, I guess.

Lip dubs, time-lapse videos, and photo-a-day challenges: The Internet is lousy with them. But a photo-a-day time-lapse lip-dub video? Just one.

British teen Matt "Cat Licker" Perren spent three years putting together quite possibly the most labor-intensive video on the web: A time lapse of himself lip dubbing to Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" made entirely out of 1,101 days worth of self portraits.

"I made a very simple lip sync animation for the song, and adjusted the frame rate to determine how long I'd have to take pictures for," Perren explained in a YouTube comment. "Then everyday I've taken two pictures [one for the start and one for the end of the video] and they gradually make their way towards the middle of the video."

New year, next level.

(Special Mention: Kyle Warfield's #lastyearofselfies.)

[H/T: HyperVocal]

Steven Seagal, martial-arts movie star and savior of Grecian Formula's investor dividend, loves animals, the Dalai Lama and rounding up dirty eye-legals with Arizona's orneriest cop. Which means maybe Seagal was born to audition for this new role: Republican successor to Gov. Jan Brewer.

America's favorite chef-turned-Navy Seal-turned-overweight-Louisiana sheriff's deputy has been busy of late helping "America's sheriff," Maricopa County police honcho and birther-in-chief Joe Arpaio, wage his bizarre vendetta against undocumented people. Oh, and meeting with Vlad Putin, and successfully fighting off a sex-trafficking lawsuit, and running over a live puppy with a tank. Eh. He probably needs to dirty up his reputation a little if he's serious about diving into conservative Arizona politics:

"Joe Arpaio and me were talking about me running for governor in Arizona, which is kind of a joke, but I suppose I would remotely consider it," Seagal told a reporter at KNXV-TV over the weekend. "But probably I would have a lot of other responsibilities that may be important to address."

He then added that America's biggest problem is waves of illegal immigrants—"hardened criminals, murderers, rapists, narcotraffickers, people like that"—pouring over her naked borders. "People are talking about, 'Oh, Islamic terrorism in America!' I don't think it's that at all, I think our biggest problem is open borders," he said.

Seagal added that Arpaio's anti-immigrant crusade is not racist, because the sheriff and his movie-acting sidekick don't see color or nationality, just criminals and everyone else. Which is not at all fraught, thanks.

"We try to get the bad guy. What that means is, if somebody murders somebody, we go and arrest them. If somebody robs a bank, we go and arrest them," the star of Above the Law added, perhaps in preparation for his lead role in the upcoming Under the Reading Level.

[Photo credit: AP]

When life gives you death threats from teenagers, you make yourself a media resurrection. Enter this heart-warming tale of Mark Zuckerberg, a humble billionaire who learned to stop worrying and love that his stock price depended on revenue from mobile advertising.

The Wall Street Journal diligently retraces Zuckerberg's Road to Advertising Damascus moment after Facebook's botched IPO—and the conversion to true mobile believers has proved fruitful. Later this month, analyst expect to announce that Facebook's 2013 revenue grew 40 percent from 2012, with $3 billion (a third of total revenue) coming from mobile advertising.

But because Zuck has pointedly said there's "no point right now in having a massive profit" from his social revolution and bragged that the ad business "factors in, like, not at all" into decisions that affect users, then (like fellow traveller David Karp), he needs a mythology makeover.

The transition looks more seamless if Zuckerberg tells himself a few white lies along the way.

1. This'll be fun!

And after turning a website born in his college dorm room into a company valued at $100 billion, the young chief executive was under pressure to prove he could sell lots of ads on smartphones.

So he went for a long walk a few weeks later through the center of Facebook's corporate campus here with Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, a top engineer at Facebook and friend who once was Mr. Zuckerberg's teaching assistant at Harvard University.

"Wouldn't it be fun to build a billion-dollar business in six months?" Mr. Zuckerberg asked. He wanted Mr. Bosworth to help lead the company's shaky mobile-ad business, then bringing in almost nothing. Another part of the job: figure out all the ways Facebook could make money.

Ads didn't sound like fun to Mr. Bosworth, but his boss persisted. Soon, the engineer was filling in the blanks of a spreadsheet that grew to about 80 pages long. The entries became the manifesto of an in-house project that Mr. Zuckerberg called "Prioritization."

2. Money doesn't matter.

Trying to copy Snapchat and get smartphone users hooked on chatheads has failed, but Facebook has found indisputable success in making money off ads—and related revenue streams. Just don't say that in front the fragile CEO:

Mr. Zuckerberg bristles at the view of some people close to him that he has changed as a CEO. His primary mission still is to connect the world digitally with Facebook. "It drives me crazy when people write stuff and assert that we're doing something because the goal is to make a lot of money," he says.

3. I wish I were a fry cook!

The "often-stubborn, idealistic 29-year-old" has figured out how to relate to advertising clients with all the overzealous insincerity of a glad-handing politician:

At a visit last summer to the headquarters of Facebook ad client McDonald's in Oak Brook, Ill., he learned how to cook an egg-white breakfast sandwich and asked the head of french fry taste tests why one batch he tasted looked a few shades lighter than fries served in McDonald's restaurants.

Her answer: French fries sold at McDonald's are cooked in oil that has been through multiple fry cycles. Mr. Zuckerberg said: "You have the greatest job ever." His own Facebook page has long been peppered with McDonald's and Chicken McNuggets references.

4. He learned this by watching you, users.

When young Zuckerberg retells his own advertising conversion story, he sees himself as a leader who merely follows where his users want to go:

Some of the changes at Facebook remind him of walkways at his old high school, Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. As a student, he was befuddled by a meandering path to the campus cafe. The route seemed strange, so Mr. Zuckerberg did some research.

The answer? "Instead of choosing the path up front, they kind of waited and saw where people walked and put a path where people walked," he says.

Log in to Facebook right now. Look around at the cornucopia of bountiful Sponsored ads, regular ads, Suggested Posts, and Upworthy links. When you only see one set of footsteps, that is when Zuck was carrying you.

To contact the author of this post, please email nitasha@gawker.com.

[Image via Getty]